After a lovely little January break and lots of quality time with the fam, we are back at the vineyard. The vines are deep in sleep under a light blanket of snow while the wines are abuzz in the cellar. Most of the 2025 wines have finished primary fermentation with just a couple stragglers working through the last grams of sugar at their own pace. It’s remarkable how much the young wines change this time of year as they slowly shed the veil of fermentation and begin to reveal the character of the vintage. Two weeks without tasting them feels like an eternity.

Some of the wines - the early whites made from fruit harvested in September and fermented in stainless steel - are really starting to sing. Blending season begins. Louise Swenson, Prairie Star, Adalmiina, and La Crescent, picked, fermented, and aged separately, will make up a few of our favorite wines - Limestone, Black Sparrow, and La Crescent. We’ll taste each component and carefully blend them to craft these wines. Teasing out flavors, popping aromatics, and building textures. Seeking complexity, intensity, balance, and beauty. Taste, discuss, conceptualize, blend, taste, discuss. Repeat. And enjoy, of course.

We’ll bottle these early whites in March, but first: BUBBLES. In just a couple weeks the new Piquettes, more Sparkling Marquette, and a teeny bit of Brut Rosé will go under crown cap and get tucked away on their sides in a dark corner of the cellar. There they will slowly ferment again, filling the wine with pillowy bubbles. We hope to be drinking Piquette again as soon as the weather warms, but we’ll have to wait till 2028 to pop the Brut Rosé. There will be lots to celebrate.